Stress Testing
Pushing past target to learn what breaks first and how it fails.
3 to work through
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intermediate
What is the purpose of stress testing beyond load testing, and what should a communication platform learn from deliberately breaking itself?
2 min answer -
advanced
At 150% of capacity, what should your service do? Describe the mechanisms.
2 min answer -
advanced
Walk me through the stress test you would run on a payments gateway in the mould of Razorpay before a festival sale, and tell me what the pass criterion is.
3 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Overload Recovery Time
Wall-clock time from the moment load returns to normal until the system is fully healthy again, which is set by spare capacity rather than by service…
practiceStress Test
Driving load beyond expected capacity to observe how the system behaves at and past its breaking point.
practiceStress Testing
Deliberately exceeding capacity to find where the system breaks and — more importantly — how.
Neighbouring topics
Performance & Capacity
General material on performance and capacity engineering.
Latency
Distributions rather than averages, and the floors physics imposes.
Throughput
Work completed per unit time, and why it trades against latency.
Concurrency
Operations in flight, and the limits that are the real capacity ceiling.
Queueing Theory
Why latency explodes as utilisation approaches capacity.
Little's Law
L = λW, and the pool sizes it computes directly.
Bottleneck Analysis
Finding the constraint, and expecting a second one behind it.
Tail Latency
p99 behaviour, amplification across fan-out, and hedged requests.
Load Testing
Realistic data, realistic mix, and a ramp rather than a step.
Soak Testing
Long runs that surface leaks and slow degradation.
Capacity Modelling
Arithmetic before load tests, and headroom for failure as well as peak.
Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
Scale out for stateless, scale up first for stateful.
Caching for Performance
Layer choice, hit ratio as a first-class metric, and cold-cache recovery.
Database Performance
Plans, indexes, contention and the pool in front of the database.
Connection Pooling
The most common hidden ceiling, and the metric nobody collects.
Network Performance Tuning
Keep-alive, compression, payload size and round-trip elimination.
Performance Budgets
Targets enforced in CI so regressions fail the build.
Profiling & Optimisation
Measuring before optimising, and optimising the dominant term.
Peak Event Readiness
Freeze, pre-scale, shed order, warm caches and rehearse.